Ilya Zhitomirskiy, Co-Founder Of Facebook Rival, Dies At 22

When the Diaspora project was first announced, it made huge waves in the tech world. A group of students from New York University were asking for money to create a social network that rivaled Facebook, but without the privacy concerns. They wanted a place where users had full control of their content and they raised more than $200,000 to do it.

Over the weekend, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, one of the founders, died at age 22. The cause of death has not yet been confirmed.

They have called their project Diaspora* and intend to distribute the software free, and to make the code openly available so that other programmers can build on it. As they describe it, the Diaspora* software will let users set up their own personal servers, called seeds, create their own hubs and fully control the information they share. Mr. [Raphael] Sofaer says that centralized networks like Facebook are not necessary. "In our real lives, we talk to each other," he said. "We don't need to hand our messages to a hub. What Facebook gives you as a user isn't all that hard to do. All the little games, the little walls, the little chat, aren't really rare things. The technology already exists."

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